274 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



whether we will or no, we keep to this way of speaking, 

 and also of thinking, when we speculate on the nature 

 of things independently of the interest they have for 

 us. Thus arises the second of the two illusions. We 

 propose to examine this first. It is due, like the other, 

 to the static habits that our intellect contracts when it 

 prepares our action on things. Just as we pass through 

 the immobile to go to the moving, so we make use of 

 the void in order to think the full. 



We have met with this illusion already in dealing with 

 the fundamental problem of knowledge. The question, 

 we then said, is to know why there is order, and not dis- 

 order, in things. But the question has meaning only if 

 we suppose that disorder, understood as an absence of 

 order, is possible, or imaginable, or conceivable. Now, 

 it is only order that is real; but, as order can take two 

 forms, and as the presence of the one may be said to consist 

 in the absence of the other, we speak of disorder whenever 

 we have before us that one of the two orders for which 

 we are not looking. The idea of disorder is then entirely 

 practical. It corresponds to the disappointment of a 

 certain expectation, and it does not denote the absence 

 of all order, but only the presence of that order which does 

 not offer us actual interest. So that whenever we try to 

 deny order completely, absolutely, we find that we are leap- 

 ing from one kind of order to the other indefinitely, and 

 that the supposed suppression of the one and the other 

 implies the presence of the two. Indeed, if we go on, 

 and persist in shutting our eyes to this movement of the 

 mind and all it involves, we are no longer dealing with an 

 idea; all that is left of disorder is a word. Thus the 

 problem of knowledge is complicated, and possibly made 

 insoluble, by the idea that order fills a void and that its 

 actual presence is superposed on its virtual absence. We 



